mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

Milksteak did the quarterbacks earlier, and now he's on to comparing running backs, taking their extant stats and seeing who projects into the same realm. I'm interested in what he comes up with for the receivers since I'm doing a similar study right now using Bill Connelly's receiver stats.

Rudock vs Cook common opponents. Click takes you to the article.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. This one's on Green et al.:

Green's 5.7 Yds/Carry looks very similar to freshman Chris Perry's 5.4 average. Freshman Tyrone Wheatley's 6.4 Yds/Carry represents the top of the comparisons, and he was much more of a TD vulture than Green has been. Carlos Brown's sophomore campaign looks somewhat similar as well. Let's see how these running backs fared in their next year.

Chris Perry had the same surprising size/acceleration combo and couldn't find a hole unless he was escorted to it, but he also had some ridiculous balance. His magnificent senior season now overshadows the period when B.J. Askew was clearly a better option. Up until this point in Green's career, however, Perry was behind A-Train. The stat comparisons only tell you so much, for example De'Veon Smith is not Jamie Morris. Ed Davis maybe.

Going back to the QBs, Dawkins posted a board thing comparing Rudock to Connor Cook thus far. When Ace inevitably drafts Jake Rudock he'll appreciate this the thing at right. What it doesn't show is that MSU was extremely conservative with Cook until progressively taking him off apron strings at the end 2013. Then again, Rudock worked for Greg Davis so…

Also how do two quarterbacks in the same conference only have three common opponents? Oh right.

Castorimorpha Control

Alum96 has been previewing Michigan's opponents, and the rodentia are up. Other than that one team that got one of the most successful NFL coaches to come back to college, Oregon State pulled off the coup of the offseason when they stole Wisconsin's head coach. It would turn out to be de gras, as the beloved AD who engineered that, Bob De Carolis, retired into the Michigan Athletic Department he was long a part of (he was the softball coach who hired Hutchins).

All of that is only of small relevance to 2015 OSU (NTOSU), which returns only two defensive starters from a unit that wasn't very good. In case you're wondering, no, Wisconsin's excellent DC is still at Wisconsin.

Alum96's previews continue with Minnesota, which is still Minnesota except minus an excellent center, an excellent running back, some excellent members of the front seven, and an excellent Maxxx. Don't miss the SB Nation Study Hall article he links.

6. The Art of Smart Football, by Chris Brown. This is a collection of articles about the recent evolution of football chalk, not pictures from his blog. "Five Stories About the Spread Offense" is brilliant and depressing.

By the way I finally met both Kryk and Dr. Sap in person. They are what I would have been if I was born 20 years earlier. And in Canada. And if I was cool.

MICHIGAN VERSION OF THE FACEBOOK $15 THINGY

Seriously? Brady, Wheatley, AC, Woodson, Harbaugh, and you can keep the extra dollar.

You should have books now. Some of you got more books than you paid for. Many of you waiting on signed copies emailed me asking when that and the t-shirt are coming. Many more have asked how to buy it. I've updated the FAQ.

MADE OF HONOR

Erik_in_Dayton wins Diarist of the Week for nailing the state of Michigan basketball recruiting:

“When you look at what they’ve done with guys like Trey Burke, Darius Morris, and Tim Hardaway, you know this is the place you want to very nearly go to school,” said point guard Trevon Duval of Newark, New Jersey. “I mean, in theory, they could take a guy like me and make me a top five pick.”

Taysom Hill, now BYU Heisman candidate. Alum96 previews the Cougars as a bellwether for the 2015 season.

A TIME WHEN MICHIGAN RAN, AND WE THREW.

Okay, I'm now old enough that people old enough to be classified as adults ask questions about history that I was a part of. This one wanted to know why we threw white goods.

These things were separate, non-overlapping traditions. I was too young to throw a toilet paper roll before they banned that, but was old enough to see it happen and want to try it SOOO BAD. The TP was because touchdowns were rare and worthy of an ad-hoc ticker-tape celebration; the ban was probably wise since cleaning it up, especially on wetter days, led to long, boring delays.

The marshmallows were nicked from other stadiums c.1989, and were still a big thing when I was a student in 98-'01. We mostly threw them at each other, but there were mini-games like trying to get one in opponent bands' sousaphones or the TV crews' parabolic microphones, or lobbing one right in front of their cameras.

There's your act of rebellion if you're looking for one. Remember, even into the 1980s a lot of games weren't televised. Michigan was proud to be on TV way more than most, but every concession made to commercials was resented in the stadium.

But really there was no good reason for the mallows except they're soft and throwable and students like to act goofy. When they installed the field turf in 2003 Lloyd personally asked the students to stop and that was their end. Traditions give college football its all-important flavor, but these traditions were probably not worth the pain they caused for the stadium crews.

CAPTION THIS:

I told you: I don't take vacations. Now show me where you keep these fullbacks they say can also play a 4-4 defense?

I initially had labels for the first few hundred voters, which stole maybe 100 votes from Iowa—I think most people didn't realize our official corn shade was darker than theirs. Anyway 80% of the readers who voted wanted Michigan to wear something appreciably darker than what they currently do, and over half preferred the orange-iest options. There's still a large and vocal minority—about 20%—who like the brighter yellows.

One of them, stephenrjking, wrote a diary to demonstrate the lighter shades have been part of Michigan's uniforms a very long time:

Also that stills are notoriously bad—the saturation is way high on the left and way low on the right. Stephen isn't crazy; he too noted the modern hue is too damn loud. Here's the Woodson interception in the '98 Rose Bowl that he submitted as a preferred shade, with a color swatch I grabbed from it:

That is exactly the same color as the "faded from the 1970s" swatch people voted on, with an average hue of 53. Hue (similar to Tint on your old television set) is a circular axis through a 360-degree rainbow spectrum, with 360 and 0 being red, 60 is yellow, 120 is green, 180 cyan, 240 indigo, 300 violet, etc. That "53" matches the official Iowa color, but the saturation is toned down about 30%. By contrast, the Adidas color online is 60 (straight up yellow), and almost everything I got from the last four years of MGoBlog photos was usually around 65, sometimes as high as 70, i.e. 5 or 10 steps toward green. Michigan's official maize, on the other hand is 48; if you get to 45 you're half-way to orange (aka "gold").

So if is traditional, it's much closer to (official) than (what they're using now) on the orange scale. Here's what it would look like with the "maize" parts on Woodson and Peterson changed to the various shades we've been arguing over (matched to Woodson's knee—click from big):

From left: current Adidas yellow, Iowa's yellow, and Michigan's official maize.

Perhaps a good compromise then is to take it back to the low 50s and tone it down so the primary blue can stand out more. That won't placate the "I actually like the bright yellow" crowd, but I'd rather have 20% of the fanbase bitching about it than 80%.

Further reading on apparel. See Maize.Blue Wagner's interesting trip through historical department store catalogues (this was how we did Amazon before the internet, people who don't know what a tint dial is). Here's the 1980 Sears jersey:

And here is a sweatshirt of a bear wearing a sweatshirt:

Picking a Quarterback

Right, the actual football. I highly recommend MilkSteak's quarterback comparison diary, where he showed various previous Michigan QBs at the same age vs this year's starting candidates. I'll give you the upshot but only if you promise you'll hit the link and give the author a plus for his work. Done? Okay:

Beyond the Gardner comparisons, Rudock appears to be a less turnover prone version of 1998 RS Junior Tom Brady, which is nice. Rudock had 22 more attempts than Brady and 5 less INTs with a TD/Int ratio of +11 to Brady's +4. The Y/Att and Adjusted Y/Att are very similar, and the QB Ratings are damn near identical.

I would take "1999 Tom Brady with fewer interceptions." Shane Morris's scant data isn't that different than a slew of other passing era guys we didn't see until they started. His freshman data jives with sophomore Todd Collins, however last year's performance, mostly against Minnesota, looks like freshman Denard Robinson minus the legs. Upshot: 2001 John Navarre, presumably with Darboh doing his best Marquise Walker impression.

Pitcher Sara Driesenga, who suffered a rib injury in the early season and only played in a handful of games, has been granted a medical redshirt and will come back for a 5th year!

This gives Michigan a 4-pitcher staff. They'll have every class represented with 5th year Driesenga, B1G Pitcher of the Year Megan Betsa who'll be a Junior, Tera Blanco who was recruited as a star pitcher as a Sophomore and incoming freshman Leah Crockett.

The team that nearly won the national championship receives an almost a one-for-one replacement for Haylie Wagner, and everyone else returns except catcher Lauren Sweet. National Championship or bust!

Board questions answered.

I'm gonna skip most of the board because it was a lot of "Omigod Nike!" But I will answer a few questions:

Whats' the best burger in Michigan? The best greasy spoon is a little dive (just a counter and four high tables) attached to the Seville Motel on Woodward in Royal Oak called Monty's Grill (my dad claimed that way back in the day it used to be Biff's and stood where Comerica Park does now). Best pub burger is Sidetracks in Ypsilanti. Please trust me that I have investigated this thoroughly—at least in the lower peninsula—and there is no question.

How would you allocate your hate? If all of my hate could damage Ohio State even a little bit I feel I have to try, so 100% to Ohio State, and Michigan State will have to make do with a sizeable portion of my contempt instead. I guess that answers this too.

Satellites are any object in orbit around a large body. Or in this case, a dad body. The Summer Swarm turned what would have been a week overwhelmed with "omigosh which clothing manufacturer is going to give us money to wear their clothing?" into a week of "omigod Harbaugh is in Alabama and not wearing any clothing!"

They broke the kids out into position groups and did some warm ups and then had races until they declared a winner in each group. After that, they did rotating agility drills all over the field. From there it was Indy for a good hour. After that, they broke the kids out into freshman and sophomores on one end and the upperclassmen on the other. Here they did basically a one-on-one, make the other guy miss drill with offense vs defense. It was 30 yards long and from the sideline to the hash and all the defender had to do was touch the offensive guy. The young kids really struggled with this as the defense won pretty much every time.

Amir_6 also put together a bunch of resulting recruiting bits that came up on Twitter. As I type this Harbaugh's speaking at the Sound Mind Sound Body Camp. Let me say that again: Jim Harbaugh is speaking at the Sound Mind…

Camp. Ironic coachspeak name aside, SMSB is turning out to be quite the showcase of the suddenly richer Midwest coaching talent: James Franklin, Jerry Kill, and Brian Kelly were also around, and defensive linemen present get to tell tales the rest of their lives of being coached by both Larry Johnson Sr. and Greg Mattison at the same time! The conference still has Hazell and Beckman, but what a difference the names at the top of Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan makes.

/remembers we just added Flood and Edsall

/punches thing.

Players come from places. While I fix what used to be a computer speaker, head over to Lanknows's diary on in-state recruiting success, as measured by the percent of top-five Michigan players who went to Michigan. That's not a very good way of doing it since there are years when Michigan looked at that pool and said "we'll take Brandon Graham" and moved on. Also there are recruitments like Chris Norman (whose total Michigan recruitment was a conversation about Barwis he didn't understand), in the same box as Edwin Baker, whom RR overlooked while chasing rabbit chasers out of Pahokee, and RoJo, who seemed like a Michigan lock until a deity told him to go to USC. I'd love to see this expanded to really dive into each recruiting season in the state.

The other "here's how recruiting turned out" diary was Erik_in_Dayton went through all of the 2007 and 2008 Stanford recruits, arming us with information to combat the three-star mafioso. Conclusion: hits and misses, but way more hits than you should expect from that lot; he really did build the basis of that program from 2- and 3-star material. And Andrew Luck.

WCWS Update: The SEC walked into the WCWS in full ESS-EEE-SEE mode. You saw the 6th seed Bama last night; there's an entire bracket of SEC teams (#1 Florida, #5 LSU, #4 Auburn, and #8 Tennessee) opposite us. Last year Bama lost to Florida in the national championship series, and Florida is a favorite to repeat. In a sport dominated by pitching the Gators have the best, Lauren Haeger, who just narrowly defeated Michigan's Sierra Romero for the college softball version of the Heisman.

The rest of Michigan's side of the bracket is UCLA, which owns a third of the national championships ever, not including the 1995 one that the NCAA vacated, demonstrating a dedication to the sport most D-I teams athletic departments can't afford for football.

This is the dispersal (bigger dot = more national championships) of softball titles since 1982:

Some of these things are only somewhat like the others; one is definitively not.

The last member of our bracket is fully owned Nike™ subsidiary the Oregon Nikes, who wear spacey backpacks everywhere they go so Nike™ can convince a demographic of schoolgirls who wear stupid-looking athletic gear to school to get Nike™ backpacks. The Oregon Nikes also have a great pitcher who finished third in the PoY running.

A distant third. Really the competition was between the senior pitcher with 194 K's who held a league that hits .330 to .183, and our own Sierra Romero.

Romero. Yes I am making this whole column about softball this week. ROMERO! Here's what a hitter who challenges for the PoY in a pitching sport looks like: Romero hit .472 with 21 home runs, 80 RBI, 55 walks, and set the NCAA career grand slam record. She also had 20 steals on 24 attempts. She plays shortstop with a Jeter smoothness (or second base because Abby Ramirez is such a good infielder).

The thing about Michigan is Romero isn't the only star. Kelly Christner hit .407 this year and matched Romero for home runs. Sierra Lawrence had a .484 OBP from the leadoff spot, plus 14 dingers. Kelsey Susalla matched Sierra2's power numbers while hitting .379. Lauren Sweet, the catcher, hit .324 with 12 homers. Michigan too has great pitchers—sophomore Megan Betsa and senior Haylie Wagner are Ace 1 and Ace 2, with senior Sara Driesenga (.078 ERA) still around as a luxury, and the future, freshman Tera Blanco, waiting over at 1st base.

Theory: Jim Harbaugh has spent all of his free time since he graduated pretending to be a softball coach. Michigan softball isn't a monster program from the heart of baseball country, isn't a golem assembled from overcharging for shoes made by underpaid slaves, and certainly is not from the conference that believes Pat Forde columns about its greatness should fulfill writing requirements.

The thing it's best known for across the softball world is it has a pinata-smashing softball Harbaugh if Harbaugh was more successful coaching it. Betsa said she gets her mental toughness from competitions like who can balance heavy logs on their hands while doing workouts. Last night Hutch literally fell over while trying to put the breaks on Romero at 3rd base; Romero ran through it but scampered back safely to leave the bases loaded for Sweet to turn a 1-0 game into the 5-0 game.

Present 1999 1986

Harbuagh/Hutch through the years

It had a .461 on base percentage this year, and outscored its opponents by an average of 9 to 1.5. It made making pizza into a theme, complete with complicated hand gestures and fan signage. It won a map-contradicting national championship ten years ago, and dances more often than that one. It led the country with 171 homers this year, and sprinkled every one of them with cheese.

Last Push. We have the weekend and then HTTV's kickstarter closes. If you just want a book this is fastest and least expensive route (not counting going to an MGoEvent or tracking me down when there's a box in my car). If you want the Fingerguns shirt…

…this is your opportunity. If you want your annual purchase of HTTV stuff to go to a good cause, get in on the kickstarter, because a dollar of book orders and $5 of your t-shirt orders go to Vincent Smith's #EATING charity, which will be starting an urban garden in Flint. Pass along to friends, family, family friends, and anyone you have knowingly shared a "Harbaugh? Harbaugh." with this past year.

A lineman reviews Jake Rudock. Spath came up with a really cool idea for analysis videos: watch some Rudock film with a former player. The player he dug up was Doug Skene. The game was Iowa-Wisconsin. I plan to draw up a couple of them—would like an end analysis. One thing that stood out is he uncharacteristically went deep a lot—against Sojourn Shelton(!) #KirkFerentzTrollsIowaFans

This should be a video. Wolverine Devotee found all the Michigan punt and kick returns since 1948; unfortunately he put them in a chart instead of going down to Bentley, pouring through reels of film, and creating a Youtube of them. We'll just have to watch this one again:

Raindrops on roses and Katzenmoyer missin's. Dez in the pose and that punter needs mittens. 46 falling and sadface Germaine; that's why I watch this again and again.

Is it really that weird that Michigan hasn't had a kick or punt return touchdown in years? No.

Give Norfleet back two of three TDs he's had called back by insano refs calling ticky tack things that had no bearing on those plays and this is like any other era. The rich times were the early '90s, when Dwyane Ware blocked two within weeks, and Derrick Alexander co-existed with the guy who literally won a Heisman for being so good at returns. With return TDs such a rarity across history, two in a season is good, and more than three would be a record. Add the spread punt, which turned half of would-be punt return attempts into fair catches, and I'd bet you a lot of teams are on similar droughts.

WD also did a turf/grass/field turf study if you're nerdy enough to care about that. The only part that really interested me was dates for the different types of surfaces at the Big House: